Menu

real life

As of today, my poems “Anniversary” and “The Winter Whales” are up on Portage Magazine‘s website. Portage is a little different from the markets I’ve published in before: Its specialty is art from the upper Midwest of the United States (not just speculative fiction/poetry!). My home state of Wisconsin falls into this category, and it’s also home to Carroll University in Waukesha, where Portage is headquartered.

If you look at the dates between this post and the last one, you’ll notice that I’ve been even worse than usual about updating this website. There’s a super exciting reason for that, which is that I’m spending this semester in Spain! While I’m here, my goals are to 1) practice speaking Spanish, 2) spend as much time as I can meeting new people and enjoying Spanish life, and 3) pass my classes so I can graduate on time. None of that’s really compatible with spending all my time staring at books of poetry and Word documents (except when I’m writing essays), so my writing output has been…nil. You can expect more from me when I come home in June.

Hello, all! I haven’t written anything here for awhile, and my latest excuse is finals. The semester is coming to a close, so things are busy around here. Also, no writing news, except that I did manage to send out three stories for publication in November. I’ve been checking my email compulsively for responses since then, even though I probably won’t find out for weeks or months whether any of the pieces were accepted. Time to move on and keep writing…

In other news, a recent class project that involved creating a website has convinced me that I seriously need to revamp this website, so look for some changes around here soon. Graphic design is really not a strength of mine, so we’ll see how it goes.

And finally, here’s an article on BuzzFeed about the awesome way a student at my school responded to a tense situation on campus earlier this week. Hugs for everyone!

Friends, it’s been a long time since I posted anything, and I think I can safely blame that on school. Ditto for publications. Writing goes on, currently in the form of fiction about a brother and sister who get lost in the woods and end up at a house made out of bread…sound familiar?

My habitual, superfluous amassing of books goes on as well. About twenty made the original trek with me from the Midwest to the wilds of Virginia, but between a killer library sale and the huge annual literary festival that takes place on my school’s campus, they have now been joined by twenty-one comrades. That’s not counting my textbooks or the library books I’m hoarding, either!

My room is nowhere near the paradisal standards of the Library of Congress or that mother of all libraries, Borges’s own Library of Babel, but, especially since the addition of a well-loved bookshelf that my friend and I rescued from beside a Dumpster, at least it feels little more like home.